Abstract
Since the late 1980s visibility has become a currency of social recognition, and a political issue. It also brought forth a new discipline, visual culture studies, and a hotly contested debate unfolded between art history and visual culture studies over the interpretation of visual culture, whose impact can still be felt today. In this first comparative study Susanne von Falkenhausen reveals the concepts of seeing as scholarly act that underwrite these competing approaches to visuality and society, along with the agendas of identity politics that motivate them. In close readings of key texts spanning from the early 20th century to the present the author crosses expertly between American, German, and British versions of art history, cultural studies, aesthetics, and film studies.
Highlights
In the early 1990s, the political battles of the 1970s seemed to be over, with class struggle as a driving force supposedly rendered obsolete by the end of the Cold War
In Britain and the United States, women asserted themselves as new subjects in academic discourse, and those groups of individuals who were fighting for visibility and a voice as the Other of dominant ethnic, cultural and sexual categories
From the early 1990s in Britain and the United States it brought forth a new discipline, visual culture studies, which in turn brought forth a new concept: visuality
Summary
In the early 1990s, the political battles of the 1970s seemed to be over, with class struggle as a driving force supposedly rendered obsolete by the end of the Cold War. Bildwissenschaft has developed a diffuseness similar to that of visual culture studies, and some German speakers mix the two terms to the point of indifference or use them as synonyms.7 This does not foster clarity when attempting to grasp the (not always evident) epistemic interests involved or to reflect on the theoretical and methodological conditions of one’s own academic activity, which is why I chose not to broaden my focus here. This bears on the question of my position as an art historian: I am not interested in expanding the remit of art history; I remain committed to it as a discipline, since its object, art, is not just one instance of visuality among others. Precisely for this reason, there is a need for skills informed by art history that allow an engagement with the complexity that inheres in a discrete object, the artwork, as the result of a specific differentiated cultural
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
